Schopenhauer and Adorno on Bodily Suffering

A Comparative Analysis

M. Peters

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137412171
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia etica e morale

Schopenhauer and Adorno on Bodily Suffering explores how the works of both philosophers revolve around an entwinement of pessimism and optimism, which links statements regarding the wrongness of the world to analyses of the human capability to experience compassion with bodily suffering and to the redeeming qualities of the arts.

1

Introduction

In the Penal Colony

In his short story In the Penal Colony, Franz Kafka describes a torture and execution device that carves the commandment broken by a condemned prisoner into his body, a procedure that takes twelve hours and results in the prisoner’s death. The workings of the machine are described in a distant, cold and impersonal way that contrasts acutely with the gruesome suffering undergone by the machine’s victim.

The cold and objective style of the story – the ‘that’s the way it is’ that, as Adorno observes in his essay on the author, each sentence written by Kafka underscores¹ – reflects the indifference of the Officer, one of its four characters, who worships the machine and does not display or feel compassion with its victim. He is indifferent to the observation that the tortured prisoner’s body is in pain. With all its force, this body fights the pain that engulfs it and with the same force the suffering prisoner fights against the pain that makes him a slave to the materiality of his body; that pulls him into the grim reality of his suffering flesh.

Delighted with the efficient way in which the machine manages to torture its victims to death in one of the most gruesome and at the same time slowest ways possible, the Officer describes its workings as follows:

The harrow is starting to write, once it’s completed the first phase of writing on the man’s back, the cotton-wool roll comes down and slowly turns the body on to its side, to offer clean space to the harrow. At the same time, the raw parts already inscribed are pressed against the cotton-wool; its special finish immediately staunches the bleeding, and prepares the surface for a deepening of the writing. The jagged edges of the harrow here strip the cotton-wool off the wounds as the body is further rotated, and drop it into the trench, and then the harrow gets to work again. Its script steadily deepens over twelve hours. For the first six of them the condemned man lives almost as before, only he experiences pain. After two hours the felt is taken away, because the man has no strength with which to scream.²

The objectification of the machine’s victim and of the pain it causes, understood as mere functions of its workings, replaceable parts in a precise and rational calculation, finds its conclusion in the Officer’s description of the end of the execution: ‘the harrow pierces him through, and tosses him into the pit, where the body smacks down on the bloody water and cotton-wool. That concludes the judgment, and we, the soldier and myself, shovel some earth over him.’³ The prisoner has been robbed of his individuality, reduced to a suffering object and, eventually, to a worthless thing, garbage.

Kafka’s story has been interpreted in different ways. Besides its religious references – the machine’s victim is said to undergo a mystical experience once his wounds ‘decipher’ the rule he has broken, becoming a materialization of the objectivity of the commandment⁴ – many have focused on its social and political meanings.⁵ Others have argued that the machine’s efficiency can be understood as illustrating the Foucaultian idea that the modern subject is constituted by practices of subordination and normalization that are surrounded by an aura of scientific objectivity and that are aimed at the body.⁶

In this book, I want to focus on several related aspects of the human condition that Kafka refers to with objective preciseness: the sheer material existence as flesh that makes every embodied being vulnerable to pain and suffering; the coldness displayed towards the machine’s victim; and the responses of the story’s readers – more specifically, those of abhorrence and of compassion – that may conflict radically with this coldness. Adorno insightfully describes the bodily feeling of Unheimlichkeit that Kafka’s stories trigger in their readers as follows:

Among Kafka’s presuppositions, not the least is that the contemplative relation between text and reader is shaken to its very roots. His texts are designed not to sustain a constant distance between themselves and their victim but rather to agitate his feelings to a point where he fears that the narrative will shoot toward him like a locomotive in a three-dimensional film.⁷

In the same essay Adorno argues that, in a radical form, Kafka’s stories reflect social, political and cultural structures under which the suffering of living creatures is presented as necessary or approached with indifference; a ‘social whole in which those whom society holds in its grip and through whom it maintains itself become superfluous.’⁸

Adorno links these observations to the concentration camps constructed under the National Socialist regime. He thereby mainly focuses on the extreme kind of corporeal suffering that took place in these camps, a kind of suffering that reduces individuals to their bodies, robs them of their particularity and of their ability to live, like the prisoner in Kafka’s story who is eventually reduced to a disposable object:

History becomes hell in Kafka because the chance that might have saved it was missed. ... In the concentration camps, the boundary between life and death was eradicated. A middle ground was created, inhabited by living skeletons and putrefying bodies, victims unable to take their own lives, Satan’s laughter at the hope of abolishing death. As in Kafka’s twisted epics, what perished there was that which had provided the criterion of experience – life lived out to its end.⁹

This passage brings us to philosophy and to the moral drive behind the reflections developed in this book. With the first line of his chief work, Negative Dialectics, Adorno links the observation that ‘history became hell because the chance that might have saved it was missed’ to the role of philosophy: ‘Philosophy, which once was obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’, and argues that philosophy is therefore ‘obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself’.¹⁰

Adorno herewith refers to Marx, who famously claimed in Theses on Feuerbach that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’.¹¹ Adorno contrasts this idea with a diagnosis of the actual course of history: he observes that philosophers, in fact, failed to change the world for the better and that enlightenment ideals like rationality, autonomy and freedom culminated in the barbarity of Auschwitz. We therefore have to re-evaluate Marx’s idea and the role that philosophy can and should play: the horrors of the world, Adorno argues, the catastrophes that scientific progress and rational thought eventually culminated in, force the philosopher to reflect and to think critically. Pulling the thinking mind down into the world itself, a world characterized, in Adorno’s view, by suffering and barbarity, would only make philosophy into an uncritical accomplice of this world, of ‘Kafka’s hell’.

Adorno mainly refers to Nazi Germany in this context, but also describes the war in Vietnam as proving the continuing existence of ‘the world of torture that began with Auschwitz’.¹² Furthermore, we only have to think of horrible recent events as diverse as the Rwandan genocide, the war in Darfur, the Srebrenica massacre, the Al-Anfal Campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan, the torturing in Abu Ghraib Prison, Guantanamo Bay, the Syrian Civil War, the hunger crisis in West Africa, or the scale to which human trafficking has developed today, to realize that several important and promising developments that took place after World War II – technological and scientific progress, the ready availability of more natural resources, the ongoing process of globalization, the modernization of the media – have not necessarily gone hand in hand with a decrease in human suffering.

Following Adorno’s emphasis on reflection, this study is driven by the (moral) attempt to critically reflect on bodily suffering, our compassionate responses to this suffering, and the failure of humanity to eradicate suffering. It thereby revolves around several of the questions that arise from Kafka’s story and that are emphasized by Adorno’s essay on the author: What makes people indifferent to the suffering of others or even willing to inflict pain on them? Why have we not succeeded, given our technological and scientific progress and given the premises and promises of enlightenment thinking, in eradicating unnecessary suffering? And what do these observations mean for our (philosophical) ideas about compassion, rationality, morality, happiness and peace?

Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor W. Adorno

Similarities

I will address these questions by discussing the manner in which two German philosophers try to answer them: Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–860) and the above-mentioned Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69).

I want to discuss these particular thinkers since, as I aim to show in this book, the observations and problems that arise from a comparison of the two constitute a unique and very critical diagnosis of the human condition that is still relevant today. In the works of few other philosophers does the pain of living beings play such a prominent role as in those of Schopenhauer and Adorno. The works of both revolve, almost obsessively, around the question how people, sharing the same existence as corporeal creatures equally vulnerable to pain and suffering, are able to inflict, actively or passively, experiences on other beings that, if inflicted upon themselves, they would reject with all their might.¹³ Both authors thereby directly confront what could be called ‘enlightenment optimism’, emphasizing the power of rationality, autonomy, self-control, progress and human emancipation, with grim and pessimistic observations of a materialistic and somatic nature, often arising from their sensitivity towards corporeal suffering.¹⁴

In the works of Schopenhauer, it is mostly slavery – still widespread in his time – that returns as an example of the institutionalized manner in which people are capable of hurting and dehumanizing each other.¹⁵ But he also refers to other kinds of suffering to develop a diagnosis of humanity:

How man deals with man is seen, for example, in Negro slavery, the ultimate object of which is sugar and coffee. However, we need not go so far; to enter at the age of five a cotton-spinning or other factory, and from then on to sit there every day first ten, then twelve, and finally fourteen hours, and perform the same mechanical work, is to purchase dearly the pressure of drawing breath. But this is the fate of millions, and many more millions have an analogous fate.¹⁶

As illustrated by the passage from his essay on Kafka cited above, the thought of Adorno is overshadowed by the barbarity to which he refers with the word ‘Auschwitz’.

It is no coincidence that Schopenhauer and Adorno both mention the effect that the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon had on Voltaire, who used this disaster in his satirical novella Candide to criticize Leibniz’s idea that ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’.¹⁷ Schopenhauer makes the following ironic observation in The World as Will and Representation:

I cannot assign to ... that methodical and broad development of optimism, ... any other merit than that it later gave rise to the immortal Candide of the great Voltaire. In this way, of course, Leibniz’s oft-repeated and lame excuse for the vile of the world, namely that the bad sometimes produces the good, obtained proof that for him was unexpected. Even by the name of his hero, Voltaire indicated that it needed only sincerity to recognize the opposite of optimism. Actually optimism cuts so strange a figure on this scene of sin, suffering, and death, that we should be forced to regard it as irony if we did not have an adequate explanation of its origin in its secret source (namely hypocritical flattery with an offensive confidence in its success ... ) ... . But against the palpably sophistical proofs of Leibniz that this is the best of all possible worlds, we may even oppose seriously and honestly the proof that it is the worst of all possible worlds.¹⁸

And in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics the following passage can be found, in which the natural disaster that hit Lisbon is compared to the industrialized killing of millions of people in the death camps of Nazi Germany:

The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distils a real hell from human evil.¹⁹

Whereas Schopenhauer’s pessimism is summarized by the claim that ‘this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds’,²⁰ Adorno’s negative diagnosis of the world finds expression in the phrase ‘the whole is the wrong’.²¹ Referring to Brecht, furthermore, the latter even describes the culture that cam...